


the fallout

by sevenfoxes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 10:25:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2578166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's mostly quiet during the drive. The first few minutes are eaten by stilted small talk that ignores the giant elephant in the room before they both let the conversation drop. Twenty minutes in, Darcy turns on the radio because she can't take the silence anymore, but apparently the only thing broadcasting in this small patch of the outback is either country music or Christian rock interspersed with the most obnoxious sounding man reciting quotes from the the bible, neither of which Darcy is interested in or capable of handling, so she switches the radio off after five minutes and learns to enjoy the silence.</p><p>"You don't have to," Steve says about the time they hit a gravel road, which lets Darcy know they’re almost there.  He lets the car roll slowly as if he’s expecting her to change her mind, to ask him to stop, to turn around.  "Seriously.  I can drive you back, you don't have to do this.  Bucky said only if you're ready, if you want to.  He doesn't expect that you'll come anyway, so don't..." he pauses for a moment, "don't do this unless you're ready.  You're allowed to not be ready, okay?"</p><p>--</p><p>Bucky, Darcy, and the fallout of the Winter Soldier</p>
            </blockquote>





	the fallout

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to a tumblr fic: [don't do this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1587563/chapters/4989747). You don't have to read it, but it will probably help this make a bit more sense.

The house is in rural Connecticut. It's a good forty minutes drive into what looks like god's country, barely a gas station or corner store blighting the pristine landscape. There are a few farms, a quarry, and what looks like a feed supply store along the way, but other than that, it’s nothing but fields of green and rotting telephone poles.

Darcy's expecting a SHIELD gomer to pick her up at the small private airport closest to the compound, but instead she climbs down off the plane to find Steve leaning against the small SUV, a lazy disguise of sunglasses and a baseball cap doing little to draw attention away from the wide spread of his shoulders.

As soon as he spots her, Steve smiles. She's forgotten how comforting he can be, how safe he makes her feel. The last time she saw Steve, she was still in the hospital. God, nearly eight months ago.

( _Blood, there had been so much blood. She remembers the feel of the knife when the blade had slid into her skin, carving…_ )

"Hey Darcy," he says, pushing off the car and walking toward her. He opens his arms just wide enough for her to climb into, closing them around her and squeezing tight. He smells and feels so good that for a second Darcy feels like she can forget the last year, that she can go back to a time where she didn’t need to draw this kind of comfort from a Steve-hug.

He tucks some loose hair behind her ear as he pulls back, creating a bit of space between their bodies. “You cut your hair,” he says, brushing his finger against her cheek. She’d cut it into a long bob more than five months ago, but her hair grows quick; it’s already past her shoulders, but considerably shorter than the last time he saw her. It’s a punch-to-the-gut reminder of how much he has missed, how much she’s missed him. “I like it.”

Darcy pokes him in the chest, the feel of steel-like muscle hidden under his thin t-shirt. She doesn’t understand how he manages to look bigger than he did before. “Letting yourself go, I see.”

Steve laughs and throws an arm around her shoulder, herding her back to the car.

 

\--

 

It's mostly quiet during the drive. The first few minutes are eaten by stilted small talk that ignores the giant elephant in the room before they both let the conversation drop. Twenty minutes in, Darcy turns on the radio because she can't take the silence anymore, but apparently the only thing broadcasting in this small patch of the outback is either country music or Christian rock interspersed with the most obnoxious sounding man reciting quotes from the the bible, neither of which Darcy is interested in or capable of handling, so she switches the radio off after five minutes and learns to enjoy the silence.

"You don't have to," Steve says about the time they hit a gravel road, which lets Darcy know they’re almost there. He lets the car roll slowly as if he’s expecting her to change her mind, to ask him to stop, to turn around. "Seriously. I can drive you back, you don't have to do this. Bucky said only if you're ready, if you want to. He doesn't expect that you'll come anyway, so don't..." he pauses for a moment, "don't do this unless you're ready. You're allowed to not be ready, okay?"

He's rambling out of nervousness. Darcy’s heart bleeds with love for Steve. She’s always known how much he loves Bucky, the lengths he’d go to for his friend, so it means all the more to her that he’s not forgetting her here, that he cares enough about her to put her first. She wouldn’t expect any different of him, but Darcy’s been hurt and let down by enough people that sometimes she forgets how honourable Steve is.

(How honourable _Bucky_ is.)

But the truth is that Darcy's been ready for a while now and has only been waiting for Bucky to be.

“I’m ready,” she says, trying to reassure him with a smile when he turns his eyes from the road to look at her, unconvinced.

 

\--

 

The moment Darcy sees Bucky out in the garden behind the palatial house, it feels like every muscle in her body suddenly clenches. It hurts. It feels like his presence is sliding over her, opening up the wounds she had long thought closed. His hair is clipped short - more like the photos you’d find of him from the war in textbooks than the longer style he had taken to wearing after he had finally cut back the shoulder length look of the Winter Soldier - and he’s got a pair of jeans and a navy t-shirt on, his feet bare in the grass.

He hears the sound of her chucks on the patio stones and turns. The look on his face is like an open-palmed slap; she hadn’t believed Steve words to be entirely truthful in the car, but looking at Bucky now, she knows unequivocally that they were. Bucky really wasn’t expecting her to come.

“Darcy,” he says quietly, and Darcy’s heart breaks in fucking two.

 

\--

 

The thing with Bucky had come out of nowhere. After a few relatively ill-advised hook-ups with a few SHIELD agents (what, Darcy has a type, okay?) and a few Stark employees, Darcy had officially written off ever developing a functional more-than-a-one-night-stand relationship while working with Jane. The life she had was fun, but not built for any type of lasting relationship. (Unless you were a demigod and a genius astrophysicist. Then, apparently, it was golden.)

Darcy had been there the night Steve had brought Bucky back to the tower, hiding him from the agencies - including the newly resurrected SHIELD - desperate to get their hands on him. She’d seen the man he’d been at first - the broken, hunted man who knew nothing besides the cruelty of others. And she’d watched him change slowly, the cold eyes replaced with inquisitive ones instead, a smile instead a void needing to be filled.

She’d met him properly for the first time when he crashed her B-movie night in Stark’s ridiculous swank cinema that everyone else in the tower avoided because they all lacked the exquisitely good taste that Darcy had been fortunate to be born with. There’d been mumbled apologies and a request to hide out in the one place mother hen Steve wouldn’t look for him so he could get a fucking respite. He’d stayed for the entirety of _The 27th Day (TERROR FROM OUTER SPACE!!)_ and then shown up the following Thursday for _Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine_ with a bag of stolen Twizzlers to wheedle himself into her good graces.

It had always been easy between the two of them. It never felt awkward or strained, more like Steve had dumped a friend directly into her lap that appreciated her loud mouth and didn’t mind her crude sense of humour, that offered alibis when she fucked with Stark’s shit and thought of her as more than just Jane’s helpful-yet-odd assistant.

And then, one night after months of movies and midnight runs to the sketchy bodega down the street for surprisingly delicious empanadas, Bucky had leaned over as Vincent Price murmured to his victim on screen who lay dying and kissed Darcy. It had felt so easy, so simple to open her mouth to his tongue, to let him kiss her, let him nudge her back on the plush sofa and slide between her legs.

It had been easy. Even with the complication of sex, with Steve and Jane’s quiet words in her ear about being careful, she’d always been able to talk to Bucky.

So, needless to say, the stilted conversation between them right now is slowly killing her. The pleasantries between them feel hollow and dusty as ash on her tongue. He smiles awkwardly as she mentions his hair, asks him about Steve even though she just spent a fucking hour in the car with him and they both know it.

“Darcy,” he says after a quiet moment, his voice filled with enough sorrow that she knows what he’s about to say before he says it. “I am so, so sor--”

She doesn’t let him finish before she interrupts him. “No. No, I don’t want to hear it. Don’t apologize to me, Bucky.”

God, the way his face splits open with pain hurts her so profoundly. She feels everything inside him echo right into her. “You didn’t do anything you should apologize for.”

The pain is quickly replaced by anger, though she know the anger is absolutely not directed towards her. His voice cracks as he whispers, “What are you _talking_ about? Didn’t do anything? DIDN’T DO ANYTHING?”

When she got on the plane this morning, she let herself think about this conversation, imagine how it would run its course, the things she would have to say and what he would say in return. She’s prepared herself for this. “That man in the kitchen _wasn’t you.”_

Bucky's eyes immediately go to her neck, to the small raised line of scar tissue that's gone silvery as it's healed. It's the first time he's seen it.

(Jane told Darcy that Bucky came to see her while she was out of it in the hospital, high on a mixture of sedatives and painkillers, but that he only stayed, flanked by Steve and two SHIELD agents, for enough time to see that she was okay, that she was alive and still breathing, before he let them take him away.)

“It doesn’t matter. It was my hand, Darcy. Mine.”

“It _does_ matter. It does,” Darcy says, turning her wrist up to point at the spot on his chest she shot after he tackled her to the ground and pushed the knife into her side, pulling it out only to go for her throat. Not close to the heart, but enough of a wound to take him down; the kitchen had been soaked in both their blood before Clint had managed to get the door open. "Besides, we all have our wounds."

Bucky's brow furrows and he shakes his head. "No," he says. "Some were earned."

She can feel the disgust bleed onto her face. "You didn't _earn_ that. I don’t know why you’re so eager to paint yourself as a monster, Bucky. You’re telling me that you’ve thought about hurting me before?”

“God no.” His voice sounds shaken in a way she’s never heard before.

“Then stop punishing yourself. I know you’d never hurt me and I know that it wasn’t you that did. The only amends you ever needed to make was to get yourself whole again.”

It grows quiet between them. The grounds of the house are so beautiful; she can see why Bucky would want to stay here, even though most agree that he’s using the compound to hide.

“Come back to the tower,” Darcy says. “They’ve told me you’ve been cleared by PsychOps, but you won’t come back if I’m there.”

She thinks back to the car, of Steve’s arms around her and feeling like there was nothing she wouldn’t do to just hit rewind, to just go back to way things were before that stupid fucking night. She spent the first few weeks out of the hospital trying to convince herself that she didn’t miss him, that she hadn’t fucking _fallen_ for the man who would never forgive himself, would never want her again. That it would be easier to let him go, that the smart thing to do would be to let him go. It all just hurt too much. She had run halfway around the world for the better part of half a year, leaving the tower and the Avengers far behind. But time had healed enough wounds for her to come back; now it’s his turn.

“Dar--”

“I miss you so much,” Darcy blurts out, rubbing at her eyes, because yeah, she’s crying. She’s got a goddamn hair trigger when it comes to blubbering, and Darcy’s secretly proud she managed to hold off this long. “I miss you so, so much, and I know we can’t go back, but you can’t fucking stay in Connecticut forever. They don’t even have a decent rock station out here for christ’s sake!”

The crying starts in earnest then, the floodgates opening on months of anger and frustration and sorrow. She plows her face into her hands, trying to calm herself. If she can only block out of the sight of him, his face heavy like he’s carrying the guilt of a million men on his back, she can stop crying.

She feels arms wrap around gently and the sobs only get harder to repress, her entire body shaking with it this time. They tighten incrementally until the pressure is perfect, holding her together while she falls apart.

“I fucking love you, you asshole,” she mumbles into his chest almost silently. She does it quietly enough so he won’t hear it, but knows she fails when his hands tighten on her. One slips to the back of her head and tilts it up. She can only imagine what she looks like: wild hair, blotchy skin, red, teary eyes.

"Can I--" Bucky starts to say before he leans down, brushing the side of his nose against hers, his telltale precursor to a kiss.

When Darcy nods gently, he kisses her achingly slowly, at first just a brush of lips, then something a little bit deeper, enough that Darcy can taste him before he pulls away. He reconsiders, ducking in to kiss her once more, so achingly sweet that she shivers against him.

A ragged breath breaks loose from his lungs before he seemingly schools everything back down into the sort of strange calm that now permeates him. "I just-- I just didn't want that to be the last time I'd touched you," he says, his thumb on her neck resting below the scar.

Darcy reaches up and cups the side of his face, holding back the tears that march angrily toward the precipice as he presses his jaw into her palm, seeking her touch. She steels her resolve and pulls back a bit.

“I won’t make you come back, Bucky,” she says. She could. She could press and manipulate and beg until he gave into her, but Darcy has never been that girl, and this is a choice that Bucky needs to make. Deep down, Darcy knows there’s a road forward - there has to be a road forward - but Bucky’s had too many people make decisions for him for too long. “I can only hope you will. If I need to disappear for a bit for that to happen, I’ll do that. Erik’s been begging me to stay with him in Stockholm for a while.”

“No,” Bucky says suddenly; his eyes are wide as if he’s shocked by his own words. “Don’t disappear. I…”

Darcy nods. “Okay,” she says, and the relief is instant on Bucky’s face. “When you’re ready, okay? We all want you back home.”

Bucky nods back, kissing her once on the cheek before watching her turn back toward the house.

 

\--

 

Steve walks her right up to the steps of the jet, his arm around her shoulders.

“You don’t have to do this,” Darcy says, bumping her shoulder into his chest enough to knock him off balance a bit. They teeter together, Darcy resting her weight against him.

“I know, I wanted to.” He smiles at her. “Thank you. Thank you for coming. I know this was hard, but you don’t know much this meant to him. To me.”

She misses Steve so much sometimes; losing him to the fallout of this was almost as hard as Bucky. “I miss you, you jerk. Once Bucky gets his head screwed on straight, you owe me a lot of movie dates. No complaints about the selections, either.”

Steve grins. “Deal.”

As she walks up the steps, Steve reaches out and grabs her hand, stopping her.

“He wanted me to give you this,” Steve says, holding out a letter. “When he didn’t think you were going to come. He gave me this to give to you.”

“Steve…”

“I don’t know if he still wants you to have it,” Steve says, and Darcy can tell that he’s struggling with this decision as he continues, “but I think whatever it is, you deserve to read it.”

She kisses him on the cheek and leans down to give him one last hug.

Later, on the jet, Darcy twists the thick envelope between her fingers, _Darcy_ written in Bucky’s elegant script on the outside. She feels raw, like an open nerve, and she’s not sure if she’s ready for what Bucky’s written inside this envelope. But she’s done running.

Darcy rips open the envelope, prying out the pages inside.


End file.
